Colm O'Regan: 'It didn’t do me harm - and so your children should do it too'

"I once got a summer job as a human scarecrow. I was brought to a set of six fields to cycle around them and scare pigeons who had stopped giving a shite about the gas banger..."

‪Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Pic: Denis Minihane.

There comes a time in every columnist's life where they end up writing: “It didn’t do me ANY harm and so your children should do it too.”

It could be anything: wallpaper on school books, margarine in your sandwiches, chilblains. I don’t know what comes over us. Maybe we see young people enjoying themselves without consulting us and they don’t look grateful enough for the sacrifices we made or the interest rates we paid.

That being said, I once got a summer job as a human scarecrow, so your children should too.

Some context: a market gardener who grew broccoli and cauliflower rented out one of our fields one year and there was an understanding that, as well as rent, I would also get a job out of it.

It was THE job to get. In exchange for picking vegetables, you got two pound an hour, muscles, a tan and to swagger into any shop and get 20 Bensons with authority.

But that wasn’t to be for me. To this day I don’t know why. Maybe it was my innate uselessness, on my first day, I wasn’t sent out with the gang. I was brought to a set of six fields to cycle around them and scare pigeons who had stopped giving a shite about the gas banger.

I was to be a human scarecrow.

Six weeks at eight hours a day. Unsupervised. I read every book in the house. Right down to the Mills and Boon. Okay, I started with the Mills and Boon. (None of which had a plot about a lowly cauliflower herd, which I saw as an oversight.)

But it worked. This low-technology solution of a young lad on a bicycle almost eliminated pigeon pilfering (or 9-5 pilfering anyway). The veg man seemed happy. Either that, or the whole thing was a long-form hidden camera show.

So because that worked, then clearly we should be employing teenagers to mind livestock against reintroduced wolves, lynxes and, birds of prey. (Appropriately protected of course. This isn’t A Modest Proposal).

Think about it. We have to repair nature, we have teenagers whose traditional summer jobs have been annihilated by automation and getting cheap veg in from Israel. We are worried about our children spending too much time on screens.

All those supposedly lost young men searching for meaning getting painstakingly detailed side-fade haircuts in barbers where everyone calls each other bro and the soundtrack is Joe Rogan talking to a cryptocurrency evangelist about how climate change is the work of Big Pharma. What they really need is to be out shouting at actual predators, scaring them away from new lambs.

Not just the youth. Adults too could be out doing good with their spare time. What’s the point of going out running pointless marathons or taking the most awkward path through a bog? 

You could be out planting hawthorn hedges or cutting rhododendron. If you want to go to Hell and Back, take Himalayan Balsam out of a riverbank. Do it for charity if you want.

I mean obviously, I’m only half-serious. Public liability insurance in Ireland means any kind of blue-sky thinking is going to cost too much. But still, it seems like we have a few crises that might help each other.

And there’s definitely a thirst for wolves. we obviously want to believe they’re among us.

When a dog that was clearly just a big cuddle monster got out in Ballyfermot recently, there was consternation that it might be an escaped wolf. 

Just in case, the zoo had to count their wolves, which is a lot less sleep-inducing than counting sheep.

And if the Cry-Wolf team are short-staffed, I’m happy to lend a hand. Once you’ve faced mankind’s greatest foe, the pigeon, you’re ready for anything.